The Gift

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways,
our national Camelot: a never-never land where American
virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in
the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral
takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust.
Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking) has
restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded
humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter
named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in
the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He
is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee
of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he
cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw
not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of
assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. It is
Blaisdell's private abyss, and not too different from the
town's public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is
over with-- the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the
mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the
gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in
power-- the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its
own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its
law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can
be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily
as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that
makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a
nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy
wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and
drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind
us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly
behind us, has to fall.